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I am happy to see Alma takes this path. Now they can actually be a real distribution and a true member of a community. They can make contributions, fix bugs, a

I am happy to see Alma takes this path. Now they can actually be a real distribution and a true member of a community. They can make contributions, fix bugs, and add extras if they choose. Now they will be “based” on RHEL ( ABI compatible ) but not “identical” per se. This is what Red Hat wanted to happen. Hopefully this puts an end to all the Red Hat has gone proprietary nonsense as well. Pretty much everything Red Hat does will go into Alma as well. Alma will be built on the back of Red Hat’s efforts but it will be in a proper community way and they will share code and not just directly rip off the whole distro.

bayindirh 3y ago
> not just directly rip off the whole distro. I literally love this take, because it can't be more wrong. Most of the CentOS, Alma and Rocky Linux users used these distributions, because they were able to find their way and fix their problems without asking RedHat's help, and RedHat was explicitly saying that they're selling the "support", not the distribution. Most of the people managed these systems had the chops to rebuild everything from bottom up, if required, and report the bugs the correct places to support everyone, including Red Hat. Red Hat changed its stance overnight and decided to sell the distribution instead of support, closed the SRPMS they provided, flipped the table and screamed "Thieves!". It's funny and sad at the same time. They started this model, lived in a win-win relationship for two decades, and changed their minds overnight like a drunk sailor, because IBM wanted more monies. This will be very harmful to everyone involved in this in the medium-long term, because RHEL will lose the mind share which supported them on the enterprise space. IBM's software products may be locked to RHEL in the short term, and a RHEL license have to be bundled with their sales, but it'll be a niche, dark room distro, not a well known one. We'll see how Fedora will fare from IBM "Community"'s bright ideas like "opt-out before the first send" telemetry.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- OCASMv2 3y ago
  Alma and Rocky directly competing with RHEL, undercutting RH's business by rebranding RHEL clones to sell cheaper support (since they don't suffer RHEL development costs) is what changed. Why should RH help bad faith competitors?
- planetafro 3y ago
  Being a corp slog nearly my entire life, it's good to stay open to all opinions. With that I say, that I have encountered piles of fraud with organizations in my career. They would buy a couple licenses of RHEL when their fleet was really CentOS and they would just lie on support calls. I think this is what Red Hat was getting at with all the "freeloader" nonsense. Tone deaf, yes. Wrong, not totally. ...continuing to be fair, Red Hat support has literally been the best I have ever used in my career. Hands down. I know I sound like a shill but I'm not. Just a reg ol' engineer. I've since moved on, like most, to cloud and past RHEL but it has it's uses. Cattle not pets for cloud!
  - mroche 3y ago
    Regarding the "freeloaders" comment, Mike McGrath made a follow-up post on LinkedIn that includes the following: > Finally, I wanted to say something about the term "freeloaders" I've seen many use it. This is a mostly internal term we have at Red Hat, it looks like at some point it slipped out in the public. So what does it mean? A freeloader is when a large enterprise business has 20 RHEL licenses, 150,000 community rebuild systems, and sometimes hundreds of user accounts and hundreds of kbase searches per month. It's not the enthusiasts, it's not the hackers and coders, it's not the academics, and it's not the people that use rebuilders because they can't afford it. We really try not to use the term, but when we do, it's about the large companies that can afford to pay but don't.
mike_hock 3y ago
Sorry, no. Red Hat broke the spirit of the GPL. The social contract of FOSS is not that you get guaranteed a viable business model or maximum profit. Red Hat went as far as they could without breaking the letter of the GPL. They likely would have gone full proprietary if they could have legally done so. Whether you see a problem with that depends on your values. A new school of thought has arisen, let's call it COSS - capitalist open source software, in which the purpose of open source is for large companies to flood the market with a loss leader to kill off smaller competitors, and for individuals to pad their resumes. Under COSS, open source is merely another tool to feed the capitalist machinery, so Red Hat's strategy seems only natural. But many of us do not share these values.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  Isn’t GPL the HN’s favorite boogeyman? Boooooo, the license is not permissive enough. Boooo, is not true freedom. Boooo, whatever shall my poor startup with millions in funding do if it’s GPL. Booo, but what about all those lost exposure points because Amazon/Google won’t be using it. But look how are the tables turned if it’s some other guy exercising his rights.
  - mike_hock 3y ago
    > Boooooo [...] booooo Sorry, I fail to see how this addresses any of my points.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    > But look how are the tables turned if it’s some other guy exercising his rights. If we're talking about IBM/Red Hat here, they are not exercising their rights. Can they close the SRPMs? Yes they can. Can they tell "You can't redistribute this GPL licensed source code", haha, no. They can't even tell you to not redistribute BSD/MIT/Expat/WTFPL[0] code. They can't override these legal texts with EULAs. GPL is working as intended, and irritating corporations the way it should, and yes, what Red Hat done is treason, not because they closed the SRPMs, but the collective things they did. [0]: http://www.wtfpl.net/ http://www.wtfpl.net/

bayindirh 3y ago

> not just directly rip off the whole distro. I literally love this take, because it can't be more wrong. Most of the CentOS, Alma and Rocky Linux users used these distributions, because they were able to find their way and fix their problems without asking RedHat's help, and RedHat was explicitly saying that they're selling the "support", not the distribution. Most of the people managed these systems had the chops to rebuild everything from bottom up, if required, and report the bugs the correct places to support everyone, including Red Hat. Red Hat changed its stance overnight and decided to sell the distribution instead of support, closed the SRPMS they provided, flipped the table and screamed "Thieves!". It's funny and sad at the same time. They started this model, lived in a win-win relationship for two decades, and changed their minds overnight like a drunk sailor, because IBM wanted more monies. This will be very harmful to everyone involved in this in the medium-long term, because RHEL will lose the mind share which supported them on the enterprise space. IBM's software products may be locked to RHEL in the short term, and a RHEL license have to be bundled with their sales, but it'll be a niche, dark room distro, not a well known one. We'll see how Fedora will fare from IBM "Community"'s bright ideas like "opt-out before the first send" telemetry.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
OCASMv2 3y ago
Alma and Rocky directly competing with RHEL, undercutting RH's business by rebranding RHEL clones to sell cheaper support (since they don't suffer RHEL development costs) is what changed. Why should RH help bad faith competitors?
planetafro 3y ago
Being a corp slog nearly my entire life, it's good to stay open to all opinions. With that I say, that I have encountered piles of fraud with organizations in my career. They would buy a couple licenses of RHEL when their fleet was really CentOS and they would just lie on support calls. I think this is what Red Hat was getting at with all the "freeloader" nonsense. Tone deaf, yes. Wrong, not totally. ...continuing to be fair, Red Hat support has literally been the best I have ever used in my career. Hands down. I know I sound like a shill but I'm not. Just a reg ol' engineer. I've since moved on, like most, to cloud and past RHEL but it has it's uses. Cattle not pets for cloud!
- mroche 3y ago
  Regarding the "freeloaders" comment, Mike McGrath made a follow-up post on LinkedIn that includes the following: > Finally, I wanted to say something about the term "freeloaders" I've seen many use it. This is a mostly internal term we have at Red Hat, it looks like at some point it slipped out in the public. So what does it mean? A freeloader is when a large enterprise business has 20 RHEL licenses, 150,000 community rebuild systems, and sometimes hundreds of user accounts and hundreds of kbase searches per month. It's not the enthusiasts, it's not the hackers and coders, it's not the academics, and it's not the people that use rebuilders because they can't afford it. We really try not to use the term, but when we do, it's about the large companies that can afford to pay but don't.

mike_hock 3y ago

Sorry, no. Red Hat broke the spirit of the GPL. The social contract of FOSS is not that you get guaranteed a viable business model or maximum profit. Red Hat went as far as they could without breaking the letter of the GPL. They likely would have gone full proprietary if they could have legally done so. Whether you see a problem with that depends on your values. A new school of thought has arisen, let's call it COSS - capitalist open source software, in which the purpose of open source is for large companies to flood the market with a loss leader to kill off smaller competitors, and for individuals to pad their resumes. Under COSS, open source is merely another tool to feed the capitalist machinery, so Red Hat's strategy seems only natural. But many of us do not share these values.

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
Isn’t GPL the HN’s favorite boogeyman? Boooooo, the license is not permissive enough. Boooo, is not true freedom. Boooo, whatever shall my poor startup with millions in funding do if it’s GPL. Booo, but what about all those lost exposure points because Amazon/Google won’t be using it. But look how are the tables turned if it’s some other guy exercising his rights.
- mike_hock 3y ago
  > Boooooo [...] booooo Sorry, I fail to see how this addresses any of my points.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  > But look how are the tables turned if it’s some other guy exercising his rights. If we're talking about IBM/Red Hat here, they are not exercising their rights. Can they close the SRPMs? Yes they can. Can they tell "You can't redistribute this GPL licensed source code", haha, no. They can't even tell you to not redistribute BSD/MIT/Expat/WTFPL[0] code. They can't override these legal texts with EULAs. GPL is working as intended, and irritating corporations the way it should, and yes, what Red Hat done is treason, not because they closed the SRPMs, but the collective things they did. [0]: http://www.wtfpl.net/ http://www.wtfpl.net/